The Guardian view on Google: overweening power

When Google received a record $2.7bn fine from the European Union in June for abusing its search engine monopoly to promote its shopping search service, a relatively minor member of an American thinktank, the New America Foundation, posted a short statement praising the regulator, and calling on the US to follow suit.

The New America Foundation is intimately intertwined with the search firm. It has received more than $20m over its lifetime from Google and related companies and individuals. So when Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, expressed his displeasure over the statement, the foundation moved quickly. The tussle that followed ended up with its author, Barry Lynn, departing the group, along with his entire team at the Open Markets programme.

To be clear: neither Google, nor Mr Schmidt, told New America to fire Mr Lynn or his colleagues. They did not have to.

Similarly, Google doesn’t have to ask the researchers whom it funds to write about public policy to turn in favourable articles. But it has funded, directly or indirectly, 329 such papers since 2005, according to the US-based Campaign for Accountability. More than a quarter of those funded directly by Google didn’t disclose the source of their money, according to the report.

The corrosive effect of this is worse than simply chilling criticism of Google, however. Academics fill an intellectual gap that regulators often don’t have time to fill themselves. They supply the knowledge that politicians either don’t possess, or have no time to ponder. Whether it’s because the whole system is increasingly marketised and reliant on corporate funding, or just that big corporates have switched on to this as a way to pursue their agenda, the pressure on experts to alter their testimony to serve the interests of business is only going to increase.

Old-fashioned monopolies bought legislation directly. But legislators have to register conflicts of interest now, while lobbyists are increasingly restrained through regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Not that that stops Google, Amazon, Facebook and Amazon from still spending millions on conventional lobbying, a practice they once eschewed: in 2002, Google spent less than $50,000 on lobbyists, but a decade later it was spending more than $18m annually.

But Silicon Valley is subtler, too. If you control the research that happens, you change the entire tack of the conversation. Furthermore, you change the perception of reality itself. If the academics arguing that modern platform monopolies cause damage to the competitive landscape are drowned out by hundreds more funded by technology firms arguing that everything is fine, they look like a lunatic fringe no matter how strong their arguments.

Google boosted its shopping service using its dominance of search, and may have destroyed other, better, options for consumers. Amazon’s dominance of the ebook market may not have raised prices, but it left the sector anaemic and competition floundering. Facebook’s profit in the advertising market is based on monopolisation of a social graph that is rightfully the property of its users. These avenues of research will never secure funding from the technology giants, but they are still our best hope to uncover the truth.